Do you have a source? I googled it and every site listed said you should close the lid. The only one that didn’t was the New York Post, which is a famously inaccurate and overly contrarian news source.
I’d say this is still up for debate. From the papers I skimmed it might be better to close the lid and open the windows. I discussed this in another comment here: https://feddit.de/comment/5298414
People usually see the initial drop of visible particles to mean closing the lid is better but it just causes the mist to aerosol more into nano particles when the lid is closed. I don’t have the study itself handy at the moment, let me dig a bit more but I did find this article which was referencing similar findings. Let me try and find the paper itself though, but in the meantime here is a small except about the study from a site that was promoting the conference where it was presented at:
The first line of that article supports putting the lid down…and so do subsequent statements…
Research has found that flushing the toilet with the lid down could reduce airborne particles by as much as 50%
The research found that putting the toilet lid down reduced the number of both visible and smaller droplets during and after flushing by 30-60%
Lid down causes 30-60% reduction of droplets in the air but they stay in the air longer…
Nice way to conviently omit the next fucking bit of the article like Google does 🙄
However, use of the lid also increased the diameter and concentration of the bacteria in these droplets.
It was also found that airborne microdroplets were detected for 16 minutes after flushing the toilet with the lid down, 11 minutes longer than when the toilet was flushed with the lid up. The researchers suggest that this could be due to particles being re-aerosolised from surfaces rather than being created by the turbulence of the toilet flushing. Alternatively, the researchers suggest that airborne particles could stick together, or agglomerate, which would cause them to remain airborne for longer.
I.e droplets with more bacteria lingering around longer in the air and traveling further. The biggest risk with bacterial contamination is concentration, which this literally tells you is increased by putting down the lid as well as spreading further with a longer time airborne. But go on showing your lack of comprehension.
